Imperial Prop-A-Ganda: More Star Tours Shenanigans

If I had the knowledge and skill, I’d be making this post about building my own RX series pilot droid (or DJ, since that is what Capt RX will be doing at Galaxy’s Edge). But, alas, I don’t have this special set of skills. So I will continue my mission to create more non-cannon Star Tours costumes. Maybe I’ll get lucky and an Disney Imagineer will get an idea from my designs and I can get a big fat ROYALTY CHECKsense of accomplishment. My co-host, Ian, has been wanting to get on the Star Tours costume train, so I started brainstorming.

If you haven’t already, check out my other two Star Tours costume builds <Here> and <Here>.

The last costumes I made required a very specific orange fabric. A particular shade and a particular material. If you got up close to the two costumes pictured above, you would see the difference in the two orange fabrics I used. That’s the problem with getting bolts of fabric from a discount fabric shop that sells factory seconds and is two hours from your house, sometimes, no matter how hard you try, the fabric doesn’t always match perfectly.

As was mentioned in Part 2 of the Star Tours costume build. I bought a ton of orange fabric that I could not use as the color was not a close enough match to what was already used on the costume. This bolt of fabric has sat in my leftover fabric box TOO LONG and something needed to be done. I was browsing Simplicitiy’s Costume Pattern Page (which I do all the time… I have a box with 15 or so Steampunk/Victorian patterns) and came across pattern 8722. Which can be made to make a few familiar flight suits:

what on earth could i use all that orange fabric on…

The tan flight suit is a little Ghostbuster-y and the brownish one is a little Rose Tico-y. So that leaves the orange one. Besides I’ve already made a Rose Tico Costume (I never posted the finished pictures and I haven’t asked permission to post her pictures…yet…). I’m not going to make just a generic X-Wing pilot. That’s boring and the pattern isn’t super screen accurate. So what am I going to do?

…Ground Crew Operations.

Think about all those men and women running around on the tarmac with your luggage, the folks on aircraft carriers strapping things on to fighter planes, or even those off-white uniformed Rebel Technicians on Yavin IV. Mostly the Rebel Techs here though.

Now I know this sounds awesome. Totally legit. Original. But, you must always remember that if I didn’t have around 4 yards of orange fabric taking up space, I probably would be working on something else, probably more blasters (I picked up 2 more Rubie’s E-11s for $2.99 each on clearance after Halloween).

The funnest part of this costume is figuring out how to take an existing Star Wars costume and give it the Star Tours treatment. This is pretty simple. Take the existing uniform and make it orange and blue. Easy. But what combination of those two colors? What other accessories to make it uniquely Star Tours?

All three variations I came up with have two items in common. The jump suit and the Rebel Tech Helmet. The first two variations were intended to use the Imperial Ground Crew armor from Rogue One. The scale in the images below on that armor is a little off.

The chest armor I used in this image is actually a Rogue One Tank Driver set just because I didn’t want to try to recolor the ground crew armor (which is similar). The back armor/Baton holders aren’t to scale. it seems that the armor for R1 was specifically made for Felicity Jones sized people and not a 6’+ person. So it looks a little wonky here. Even though I said this was mostly a way to get rid of orange fabric, I wanted to see what it would look like if I reversed the color palette.

I do like this combination, it really shouts “Tomorrowland”, but, I don’t have that much blue fabric on me at the moment. So this particular design is getting shelved for now. It’s also at this point the decision to drop the armor/batons came up. Not because it would be hard to get, but because it would cost more money than I, or Ian, wanted to pay for what is objectively a 1-2 time a year gimmick costume. With a little re-arranging, I came up with this:

its difficult to realistically recolor something colored, to white. if there is, let me know.

Kind of an anti-climax, huh? OK, I hear you. The idea here is to take the vest that Bodhi wears in R1 and hope to remove ALL color from it, then go back in and recolor it in theme with Star Tours. It looks a little plain at the moment, but there are a ton of small things still to add to it. Tools, harnesses, shoes… I will need to spend some time researching what equipment flight deck ops sailors use and how I Star Wars that up. And to top it off the survival vest they used for the movie is available for around $50. If all goes well, this will premier at Anahiem Wondercon ’18. Which gives me way more time than I had on the last two Star Tours Costumes.

That’s the plan for the moment. Many revisions are sure to be on the way. I’ll be posting updates here on HothTopicsPodcast.com as well as on our Twitter account @HothPod. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free tot send me an email at Hothpod@gmail.com

Coming up in the next post:More Planning, Pattern Modding, and a slight miscalculation…

One comment

Welcome to Hoth Topics

We are two Star Wars fans that wanted to give back to our fan community for everything it has done for us. Join us 2-3 times a month for lively discussions, rambling nonsense and whatever else comes across our minds, all to do with Star Wars.